What grinds my gears

It has been noticed through experimentation in psychology, that when normal everyday people are put into a position of power over a group of other people (especially if it's a team of people governing the actions of another group of people), it often happens that the people in power tend to act in a more and more abusive manner as time passes, especially if there's no deterrent to stop such an abuse. Such a deterrent in real life situations is usually the law and the threat of severe punishment if a person in a position of power starts abusing that power. A typical setting where there's a constant struggle between the urge to abuse one's position of power and the fear of the consequences happens in prisons: It's a generally known fact that prison guards tend to become more and more abusive towards the prisoners if there are no deterrents to stop this. This has been verified with actual experiments. Often even people who would never do such things may get lured i...

I recently watched the so-called "The Omen Pentology", which is a DVD set that consists of the original The Omen trilogy, the made-for-TV sequel "The Awakening " and the 2006 remake of the first movie. I'll like to talk about the fourth movie in particular. The fourth movie was just predestined to be universally panned by critics and hated by fans. There's no way it could have been otherwise. Just consider: The original trilogy is a full story arc, and its third part just ended the story, period. The fourth movie is a pure sequel to the third movie, it artificially and forcefully tries to continue the story to cash into the modest success of the trilogy, it's more or less a rehash of the first movie with nothing really new or innovative, and to top it all, it's a low-budget made-for-TV movie. This is just like a perfect storm for the movie to be universally hated, no matter what it actually contains. It's just physically impossible for a m...

"Rational thinking is not natural" may seem like quite an odd and stupid title, but let me explain. (No, it's not an attack on rational thinking. Again, please let me explain.) Irrationality, superstition and anti-scientific sentiments seem to be on the raise (again) in later years. The irrational has always fascinated people for the entire history of humanity. There has always been (and unfortunately there probably will always be) a very significant portion of humanity that wants to believe in all kinds of superstition, bypassing all rational thinking. However, irrational thinking has experienced a huge boost recently. Not only is young-earth creationism and anti-evolutionism on the raise, but a general anti-science mentality among other groups as well (such as many nature activists). To these people, somehow, the very idea of requiring actual observation, measurements and testing before believing something seems silly and limited. Not only is rational thinking disca...

One of the key techniques that cults, and even many more open religions, use to keep their followers is to discourage, if not even outright forbid, communication with the "opposition". If your intention is to keep a flock of followers who agree with your views, this technique makes sense and is pretty effective. If your followers never communicate with people with differing views and never hear and have to think about criticism of their own views, and are never exposed to alternatives, that's an effective way to keep people believing in your views. Sometimes some of the people, even when isolated from alternative views and criticism, will start thinking about it on their own and doubting the veracity of the views they have been believing. However, this is relatively rare (and usually other techniques are used to discourage, mitigate and outright destroy such doubts.) But this post is not about religion. It just served as an introduction. What I find curious is that ...

Have you ever noticed how the concepts of "good movie" and "entertaining movie" seem to be completely independent of each other? It's not even unusual to see movie reviewers on the internet post or say things like "it was quite entertaining; don't get me wrong, it was a bad movie, but I still liked it." (For example, the latest instance of almost exactly this that I have seen was a review of the movie Battleship .) This kind of statement feels completely contradictory to me. Now, don't get me wrong. There are two kinds of "enjoying a bad movie": Enjoying a movie because it's so bad, and enjoying a movie regardless of it being (allegedly) bad. I'm not talking about the first type of movie here. Movies like Plan 9 or The Room can be enjoyed because they are so hilariously bad. It's just outright amusing to see, for example, toy flying saucers being dangled from clearly visible fishing lines, an actor who's ve...